Praise for Siblings and Other Disappointments: “Heacock’s stories feel like tiny homecomings, like peering in the windows of the real Northwest and glimpsing its shabby, secret heart. These characters’ poignancy is in the smallness of their desires: to sit down again at the same counter; to be seen; to touch hands across the darkness, even as time makes them—and all of us—obsolete.” —Megan Kruse, Call Me Home “Kait Heacock’s stories map a meticulous landscape of loneliness. Whether she’s exploring the lives of two people who live in the same house but communicate only through scribbled confessions, of a father whose gambling addiction blinds him to the needs of his daughter, or of a mother praying for the end of the world, she’s attuned to both the intricacies of isolation and the elusive connections—often internal ones—that stave off despair. Siblings and Other Disappointments is a stark, honest, and moving collection.” —Scott Nadelson, Aftermath and Between You and Me “Twelve stories of wounds and disappointments—Kait Heacock’s debut story collection, Siblings and Other Disappointments, winds through fractures and futile hopes, broken promises and loneliness, exploring all the ways family—however it’s defined—can simultaneously be comforting and terrible. Each story in the collection is painful in its own way, and yet there’s hope to be found, too, and certainly beauty. As a whole, Siblings and Other Disappointments skillfully explores the space between what we want our families to be and what our families actually are.” —Nicole Wolverton, The Trajectory of Dreams “Kait Heacock’s Pacific Northwest is full of fractured families trying to repair themselves, wayward children making incomplete sense of their parents’ foibles and grief, a mother waiting patiently for the Rapture, and a father bonding with his daughter over a Mac Attack Stack Challenge. These are closely observed, unsentimental stories about parents, children, husbands, and wives finding their uncertain way after wreckage has laid them low. Yet the heartache at the center of these stories is leavened by Heacock’s cleareyed compassion and humor. This finely crafted debut collection heralds an important new voice in the literary West.” —K. L. Cook, The Girl from Charnelle and Last Call “The close-up character studies in Kait Heacock’s stories are full of real-life pain, sadness, and desire. Although there are a lot of heartbreaking goodbyes throughout Siblings and Other Disappointments, the encouraging thing is that this book is one hearty hello to an impressive new storyteller.” —Kevin Sampsell, This Is Between Us and A Common Pornography
Siblings and Other Disappointments
Siblings and Other Disappointments
stories Kait Heacock
Portland, Oregon
Siblings and Other Disappointments Š 2016 Kait Heacock ISBN13: 978-1-932010-85-5 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Ooligan Press Portland State University Post Office Box 751, Portland, Oregon 97207 503.725.9748 ooligan@ooliganpress.pdx.edu www.ooliganpress.pdx.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Heacock, Kait, author. Title: Siblings and other disappointments / Kait Heacock. Description: Portland, Oregon : Ooligan Press, 2016. Identifiers: LCCN 2016012497 (print) | LCCN 2016023763 (ebook) | ISBN 9781932010855 (trade paper : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781932010862 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Families--Fiction. | Disappointment--Fiction. | Psychological fiction. | Domestic fiction. Classification: LCC PS3608.E225 A6 2016 (print) | LCC PS3608.E225 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016012497 Cover design by Ryan Brewer with production assistance by Leigh Thomas and Cade Hoover Interior design by Leigh Thomas References to website URLs were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Ooligan Press is responsible for URLs that have changed or expired since the manuscript was prepared. Printed in the United States of America
For Justy
Contents Upstairs
11
Sirens
21
The First Wife
37
Closing Joe’s Bar
51
Father and Daughter
65
Mom and the Bear
75
Longer Ways to Go
91
Huckleberry Season
107
After the World Ends
123
No Horse in This Race
133
So Be It
153
Siblings and Other Disappointments
171
Upstairs
Peter was an agoraphobic. He couldn’t explain what that was a year ago, but he could describe now what it was like to stand by the front door and feel the heat radiate off the knob, so sure it could burn you if you touched it. He couldn’t explain his newly diagnosed panic attacks, but he knew that going outside triggered them, so he stopped. He never would have guessed when he rented this one-bedroom basement apartment that it could become his waking coffin, that he would let her death bury him alive. It was the first place he found on Craigslist; the woman who owned the house was the first landlord to return his call, and he took it without inspecting the toilet or looking closer at the cracks in the ceiling. Sylvia didn’t know she had rented the apartment in her basement to an agoraphobic. She thought they kept different hours.
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As a nurse who worked the graveyard shift three nights a week, she had grown used to keeping hours with truck drivers, ghosts, and the women working on Highway 99. She had become a ghost herself at some point. She lost track of when. Sylvia didn’t sleep most nights. Working as a nurse gave her an excuse some nights; the others, she hadn’t noticed. She discovered she was an insomniac as she fried a pan of corn tortilla strips for migas and saw that the clock on the microwave said four a.m. Peter had walked into the apartment two weeks after the mugging. It wasn’t until he had finished unpacking and looked out the window at the wet snow and gray slush of January that he realized he never wanted to leave again. The therapist who visited him on Wednesdays stamped him with post-traumatic stress disorder. Peter’s father paid a lot of money for the therapist to make house calls. Peter’s father expected a quick turnaround. “Be a man, son,” he said after three months. “When your mother died…” “You were already married to your new wife,” Peter reminded him. After six months in the apartment, a check came in the mail every month from his father, and his phone calls came less than that. Sylvia looked for remedies to sleeplessness in warm milk, baths, and advice posted on online forums. She had Ambien pushed on her but didn’t want to need a medicine. The night after an orderly gave her a joint to relax her, she spent four hours sitting on the kitchen counter and ate an entire box of Cheerios. The hours she didn’t spend sleeping afforded her extra time for thinking. She remembered her mamá always finding time to cook the family breakfast even though she left for her shift
SIBLINGS AND OTHER DISAPPOINTMENTS 13
at the hospital in Sunnyside before Sylvia and her brothers boarded the bus for school. She thought of the thousand small ways mothers make sacrifices—so many before their children have the words to ask for them. She thought about her divorce twenty years ago (for making such a mortal sin, her mamá didn’t speak to her for a year after), whether she regretted never having children, and how lonely the end of your life can become when there is nobody around at night. The technicalities of agoraphobia were easy for Peter to work out. He ordered groceries online and, when they arrived, called his friends over to bring them inside. His stepsister dropped in once or twice a month with bulk toilet paper and weed. He insulated the windows to prevent any outside air from seeping through like poisonous gas. The dog door put in by the previous renters was carefully sealed with duct tape. The outside world came in quick gusts when visitors opened the front door, but even then, Peter usually stood in his bedroom to keep that wind from touching his skin. Realizing she had no way of overcoming her insomnia, Sylvia took up hobbies. She painted watercolors, made scrapbooks, knit hats and scarves for her sobrinos, tried playing poker online, and wrote letters to the editors of the Seattle Times. No hobby had managed to hold her attention for more than a few weeks. She felt satisfied that she could accomplish so much in such a short amount of time and thought of all the other activities she had spent her life hoping to learn, like French cooking. But inevitably, somewhere around three a.m., she found herself pacing her living room. Peter had only met his landlord twice, once to look at the place and the second time to exchange payment for the key. His rent
14 KAIT HEACOCK
checks went out the door with his visitors, and he had no need to call her down into his apartment. After a while her face had faded from his memory until she became a series of noises. At first, he hadn’t noticed how much she’d grown to be a part of his life. Her noises had become ingrained in his routine: On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays (the nights she worked the graveyard shift), he awoke when she came home, flipped over onto his stomach as she set her keys onto the kitchen counter and turned on the faucet, and fell back asleep knowing that the sun wouldn’t rise for a few more hours. On the nights she wasn’t working, he could hear her favorite television shows, the smoke detector beeping when she cooked, and occasionally her voice on the telephone. The sound of her voice comforted him, like his favorite teacher or aunt. The nights became longer as he adapted to her schedule. During the day, when she worked, he could bask in the silence from above and feel guiltless about spending time alone, something he had suppressed most of his life. But at night, her footsteps became the ticking of the clock, the rhythm of a heartbeat, unrelenting—night after night. He caught her sleeplessness like a cold. He thought about pounding on his ceiling with a broom. It reminded him of his dorm-room days, and he didn’t want to resort to that. He couldn’t ask the woman to stop walking in her own apartment. But why was she pacing? Why didn’t she sleep? The pacing started out as a tactic to tire her, but after a month it developed into something else. It was a mild workout (she thought her clothes felt looser than usual), it was a stress reliever, and it was something to pass the time. One night she paced her living room for three hours. Then she started to count her steps, and with the repetition of the numbers in her head and
SIBLINGS AND OTHER DISAPPOINTMENTS 15
the sound of her feet hitting the hardwood floor, she managed to quiet her restless mind. She couldn’t sleep, but for the first time, she began to enjoy the peacefulness of night. Sometimes it seemed like the footsteps were getting louder. Was she jumping rope? Was she tap dancing? Didn’t she know he could hear the floorboards lurching with every step? One night, he finished the last of his beer and opened the bottle of whiskey he kept on reserve. He sat on the couch in his boxers, clinked the ice in his glass, and listened. After he was fairly drunk, he felt convinced that this woman was trying to tell him something. This woman upstairs somehow held the secret of what he was supposed to do with his life now, but he couldn’t get to her. So he listened. He thought perhaps her footsteps were sending a message, like Morse code. He looked it up online and tried to follow the dots and dashes of her walking with the chart he pulled up on his screen. He abandoned this plan when he realized he couldn’t hear dashes, all dots. When his therapist came that week and he told her about the woman upstairs, she nodded vigorously, almost enthusiastically, as if his new obsession were a healthy step forward. “Maybe you could try talking to her, call her on the phone, perhaps,” she suggested. “And tell her what? That I haven’t left the house in over nine months, that I am scared to go outside again because every time I even think of it, I picture my dead girlfriend’s face? Do you think she’ll let me sign the lease for another year if I tell her that?” Sylvia counted one thousand steps one night and felt like she had accomplished something. Next time she’d try for fifteen hundred.
16 KAIT HEACOCK
It happened during the day, when the apartment was quiet and he felt especially lonely. Instead of passively listening— to her footsteps, to her muffled phone calls, or to her teakettle whistling—Peter finally realized he wanted to talk back. After months of his family, his friends, and his therapist prodding for answers to everything from how he felt to what he planned to do next, it dawned on him that the only person he cared to talk to knew him only through a check in her mailbox. There was no guarantee she could hear him. People above rarely listen to those below, and it was not like she would ever put her ear to the ground. The best he could do was write to her. He had been raised Catholic; a confession felt the most appropriate. He wasn’t ready to talk about it, the thing everyone wanted to hear. He wanted to start small, someplace far back, a secret he had never told anyone before. When Peter’s friend stopped by with a bag of groceries, Peter handed him an envelope with his rent check and a square one the size of a thank-you card, blank save for his landlord’s name written in his best cursive. “What’s the blank one for?” his friend asked. “It’s a note to her. She’s been keeping me up at night. It’s just a neighborly comment on noise level,” he lied. “Put it in her mailbox behind the check.” He felt right just knowing that his secret had entered the world. He pictured it growing wings. He pictured his landlord holding it and plucking its feathers. Sylvia came home from work feeling exhausted. It was flu season, and she had spent most of the day giving shots to people who sneezed on her. The stack of mail she threw on the table looked average. She saw her cable bill and a reminder from her dentist of her approaching six-month checkup. She opened the
SIBLINGS AND OTHER DISAPPOINTMENTS 17
envelope from her tenant and put the folded rent check into her wallet. Then she saw the small white envelope with only her first name on it. When she opened the envelope and looked at the scribbled note, she assumed it to be some kind of dirty joke. When I was twelve, I masturbated thinking about my stepsister. She looked around her to make sure nobody was peeking into her window, laughing. She threw the paper into the recycling bin, stopped for a moment, pulled it back out, and ripped it in half before throwing it in the trash. Whether his landlord knew the notes came from him or not wasn’t the point. The point was getting it all out. I cheated on the SATs appeared two weeks after the first note. I never once attended my microeconomics class sophomore year came at the end of the month. I was the one who puked all over my friend’s car was dropped off after only a week. He had his friends put them in the mailbox faster, without even the pretense of accompanying the rent check. I cheated on my junior-year girlfriend when I studied abroad was followed a few days later by I’ve never forgiven my father for leaving my mother. Sylvia had found her distraction, something on which to focus her directionless time and energy. The letters appeared in her mail like tiny Christmas gifts. Each one’s arrival was a sign that she was not as alone as she feared; at the very least, someone else was as alone as she felt. She stored them safely next to the saint candles she hadn’t lit since her mother passed: Santa Teresa, Santa Martha, and her favorite, Santa Barbara. She was building an altar out of someone else’s sins. When they started coming more frequently, she began to anticipate them daily, like when she used to anticipate sleep. She